Guido: It was probably more a side effect of the community process around PEPs and the multiple implementations. When I originally wrote the first set of documentation, I very enthusiastically started a language reference manual, which was supposed to be a sufficiently precise specification that someone from Mars or Jupiter could implement the language and get the semantics right. I never got anywhere near fulfilling that goal. ALGOL 68 probably got the closest of any language ever with their highly mathematical specification.

When should debugging be taught? And how? Guido: Continuously. You are debugging your entire life. I just “debugged” a problem with my six-year-old son’s wooden train set where his trains kept getting derailed at a certain point on the track. Debugging is usually a matter of moving down an abstraction level or two, and helped by stopping to look carefully, thinking, and (sometimes) using the right tools. I don’t think there is a single “right” way of debugging that can be taught at a specific point, even for a very specific target such as debugging program bugs.

A lot of the proposals to somehow get rid of explicit self come from people who have recently switched to Python and still haven’t gotten used to it. It becomes an obsession for them. Sometimes they come out with a proposal to change the language; other times they come up with some super-complicated metaclass that somehow makes self implicit. Usually things like that are super-inefficient or don’t actually work in a multithreaded environment or whatever other edge case, or they’re so obsessed about having to type those four characters that they changed the convention from self to s or capital S.